It appears that several Surface Pro owners are experiencing issues with their Wacom pen that comes with the device. While the temporary solution revolves around uninstalling the pen driver and rebooting, we hope to see a full fledged solution by the next round of updates from Microsoft.

The Surface Pro pen offers 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity making it one of the most sensitive pens out there for tablets. The pen is far from perfect though, as it can feel laggy or flimsy at times. Several owners of the Surface Pro have reached out to Microsoft complaining about their pen not working at random times.

“I received my Surface Pro yesterday and the pen worked fine at first and now after being asleep for a few hours, it is no longer being detected by the screen. I’ve rebooted and even perform a system restore and still nothing,” one user asked on Microsoft Answers. “Today I lost the pen functionality again. This time I tried shutting down, waiting a few seconds, and powering the machine back up. Pen functionality came right back,” another user added.

Microsoft offered a temporary solution which involves uninstalling the driver for the pen (under mice and other pointing devices in device manager), then restarting the Surface Pro. Once you restart, the driver will re-install itself and the problem will go away. Obviously this seems to be a faulty driver issue. We expect a permanent solution to arrive during the next round of updates in March.